A commentator on CNN – a retired police officer – thinks it was planned long in advance and was just waiting for an event with a specific location to solidify the plans.
– Retired FBI special agent Steve Moore said an attack of that magnitude required advance work.
– “This was an attack planned long before – waiting for an opportunity to go,” Moore said. “I think there was so much logistically, ammunition-wise. They may not have planned the location, they may not have planned the vantage point. But they had prepared for an attack before last night’s shooting is my guess.”
I can’t help but notice this feels a lot like Islamic terrorism – decentralized movements with violent extremists that are difficult for peaceful people to manage. Perhaps it’s never going to be healthy to have this much anger and conflict since the bell curve will eventually produce killers out of it.
You mistake my words for support of police or blame of BLM. I dont care for the US police any more than the police care for the 5+ blacks they execute each day.
I never agreed with BLM methods and rhetoric indeed if you search QT3 for “demonisation of whites” one of the few people warned against this mindset was me, and one of the shooters have already stated hate of white people as a cause. “Fucking white people” isn’t my meme.
But I’m not going to act surprised it’s now at this. Socmedia slactivism and real activism hasn’t worked, people feel that direct action is now a real alternative, and though I disagree with violence I understand why it happened.
I can’t believe people still think this is in anything other than laundered racism. White on white crime is also a problem among whites, who spend a lot of time among whites; not to mention latino on latino crime, new yorker on new yorker crime, etc.
Yeah, I think that it needs to be pointed out how @olaf 's suggestion that “they should be focused on reducing black on black crime” is wrong headed. Not that it’s not a problem, but rather that everyone accepts its a problem. It doesn’t really need to be stated. Tons and tons of people get prosecuted and convicted for such acts all the time.
The issues of police brutality are especially heinous and require dealing with, because the cops are supposed to be the good guys.
Trying to ignore the activities of bad cops, pretending that we need to focus our efforts on other things, is terrible. Because it ignores the fact that a distrust of cops is a major contributing factor to crime in minority neighborhoods. When people distrust cops, and the cops can’t operate effectively in those places as a result, things get worse for everyone involved.
I know a guy who is a PA state trooper, and he is absolutely against these bad cops. He feels no allegiance to them. Because they make it harder for him and other GOOD cops to do their jobs.
Cops are the good guys, and as such, they need to be held to the highest standard. Saying that we should somehow excuse their criminal behavior because criminals do it too, is absolutely insane.
It does not benefit cops to ignore it when they commit criminal acts. It harms them.
Here in europe we capture most people alive. We don’t kill suspect or even criminals.
Is doable. But the USA cops are not doing it. They favor getting something solved quickly over human lives.
I don’t think it’s a real problem. Think of where that conclusion leaves you: black people need to shape up. How about: because black people are poor, there’s more crime by black people, who are around other black people, who are the victim of those crimes. I don’t understand why we’re supposed to believe “black on black crime” is a special thing they need to work on.
pwk, while I admire your enthusiasm, your numbers are off – significantly.
The Washington Post has been monitoring police shootings. Total number last year was 990. This number is appalling (and almost double the official number!), but much less than 5 per day. Furthermore, of those 990, 258 were black. Again, appalling, but less than 1 per day.
This is not to minimize the nature of the problem, but rather to portray it accurately. In the US, we have a problem with police violence. Providing misleading information only gives ammunition to your opponents.
How many European criminals are toting semiautomatic weapons and looking at long, harsh prison sentences when they’re caught? It’s an apples and oranges situation – the European context is totally different. Here in the US, the cultural differences and the fact that we’ve got a couple hundred million firearms in private hands isn’t really helping to resolve the issues around violent crime and the apprehension of criminals.
None of that is to say that there isn’t massive room for improvement, of course, but just to say that blanket comparisons ignore some real differences.
Well, people killing each other is most certainly a problem. Not from the perspective of “black people need to shape up”, but from the perspective that violence is hugely damaging black communities.
Regardless, as I pointed out, this is immaterial when talking about crimes perpetrated by police.
The man in the photo, Mark Hughes, tells Dallas TV station KTVT that he
“flagged down a police officer” immediately after finding out he was a
suspect. He says police lied during a 30-minute interrogation, telling
him they had video of him shooting.
Is this a legal tactic? At least they figured out pretty quickly it wasn’t him.
The racial narrative applied to the topic of police brutality in the US is simply not supported by evidence. Out of 509 people shot and killed by police this year, 123 were black.
This 24% is actually a considerable underrepresentation when considering black violent crime and arrest rates compared with the rest of the population.
That police officers are actually more hesitant to shoot blacks is supported by psychological studies as well.
BTW, the total number of unarmed blacks killed by police this year is 12.
So because black men are 4 times more likely to arressted for a crime, therefore 100% law-abiding and/or compliant black people should be murdered or shot by police at a significnatly higher rate than law-abiding and/or compliant white people?
You have provided no evidence of this. The vast majority of police shootings are not of people who are law-abiding and/or compliant, but rather of violent criminals. Given the fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a far higher rate than whites, it is only to be expected that there would be a similarly disproportionate number of police interactions with black violent criminals as opposed to white. The proportion of blacks killed by the police is considerably less than what one would expect given this.
It’s true my only evidence is news reporting; incidents where law-abiding white people are shot or murdered by the police do not seem to make the news. Or maybe it really happens a lot more rarely to white people.
I’m sure you don’t mean to suggest that a higher rate of criminality amongst the black population (which itself is part of a vicious cycle which includes unfair targeting of black people by l;aw enforcement) justifies or minimizes police murder of black people who were either doing nothing wrong or whose offence did not warrant summary execution.
There is currently video of a white kid in my town who was killed by police maybe two weeks ago. The FPD came out with the cop cam video right away, but yesterday video came out from a witness that sure makes it look like they shot him while he was on the ground trying to raise his hands. This has gained no national traction, although the far right will no doubt be using it soon.
